Taking place in the heart of Washington, DC, DPLAfest 2016 (April 14-15) will bring together hundreds from DPLA’s large and growing community for interactive workshops, hackathons and other collaborative activities, engaging discussions with community leaders and practitioners, fun events, and more. DPLAfest 2016 will appeal to anyone interested in libraries, technology, ebooks, education, creative reuse of cultural materials, law, open access, and genealogy/family research.

Area institutions serving as co-hosts include the National Archives and Records Administration, the Library of Congress, and the Smithsonian Institution.

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Working with large collections of digitized historic newspapers provides a challenge and an opportunity for libraries and researchers. From analyzing articles transcribed through optical character recognition text (OCR) to hierarchical serial metadata, digitized newspapers provide new opportunities for researchers to explore how news traveled, was used and reused, and how it affected the communities it informed. For libraries, newspapers are complex, as serials and as compound objects, filled with poems, ads and articles on a single page. This session would include lessons learned from the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP) about digital object standards, interface design, use of APIs and bulk data downloads and feedback from users such as genealogists and digital humanities researchers. The session will also provide information about the Chronicling America Historic Newspapers Data Challenge, a contest sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities. This opportunity challenges members of the public to produce creative web-based projects using the API developed by the Library of Congress to access the data in Chronicling America.